art with a spiritual flavour | the more-or-less official blog of pacific theatre

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Wind Tower by Sarah Hall (Regent College)

The True North: Lux Nova Wind Tower, Regent College

Stained Glass Artist Sarah Hall

By the age of nine, Sarah Hall already possessed a sense of vocation. “My father was on our church building committee,” she says, “and I remember staring at the stained glass windows while I waited for the meetings to end. I was entranced. I knew then what I was going to do—I was going to make windows.”

Following her call entailed traveling outside North America to find schooling specific to her needs. Hall enrolled in the Architectural Glass Program at Swansea College of Art, Wales, U.K., and graduated with her Diploma in Architectural Glass from the City and Guilds of London Institute. After apprenticing with Glass Master, Lawrence Lee, Hall spent a year in Jerusalem studying gold-leaf and techniques from the Middle East. While in Jerusalem, she had the opportunity to attend religious services of many different faiths, an experience, she says, “in which I came to know myself as a Christian.”

Hall’s art includes both abstract and figurative works, many of which are among the largest stained glass projects in North America: the 3000-square-foot window wall at St. Andrew Church, the 33 monumental windows based on the Doctors of the Church for St. Catharine of Siena in Columbus, Ohio, and—her current project—the True North: Lux Nova Wind Tower at Regent College in Vancouver, B.C. The 40-foot-high tower includes the first stained glass installation in North America to utilize photovoltaic cells, an energy source that generates electricity without emitting greenhouse gases. The photovoltaic array, embedded between two panes of glass, is composed of thin silicon and metal cells that convert sunlight into electricity. The energy collected will be used to illuminate the park at night with a changing color program inspired by the music of composer/violinist, Oliver Schroer. Containing 144 square feet of photovoltaic art glass, the installation also incorporates the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic.

Winner of numerous awards for her work, Hall was recently elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Art, an honor bestowed on only five other Canadian glass artists. In addition to her work as a glass artist, Hall has authored numerous articles, as well as The Color of Light: Commissioning Stained Glass for a Church, published by the Archdiocese of Chicago in 1999; it is the first book of its kind in the field. Hall currently maintains studios in both Toronto and Germany.